February 2017

Action shot of me facilitating an investor panel and explaining what not to do.

A pitch doesn’t have to be perfect to work

Startup mentors spend a lot of time giving pitch advice. The advice given spans everything from format and content to delivery and even personal wardrobe choices. Some of the advice is good and a lot of it is not, but in defense of the well-meaning mentor, it is worth noting that the target – the right message delivered the right way to the right audience – can be hard to hit.

“Thank you for a really good pitch…”

Take for example, a pitch I heard recently while running an investor panel in Gothenburg, Sweden. The pitch was awful, and yet it really caught the panel’s attention. The pitch was vague. It was long on the problem and short on the value created, but Swedes are unfailingly polite. Each investor started their feedback by saying ‘thank you for a really good pitch’, before asking some rather revealing questions.

The first investor said he didn’t understand the product. The second investor agreed with the first and said that she didn’t understand the business model. The third agreed with her predecessors and said that she didn’t understand how the product was sold. The pitch looked like a disaster.

Sometimes ugly works

The fourth agreed with all of his colleagues, but then said that he wanted to meet with the company after the session. Why, you ask? Because they had 10,000 B2B customers, that’s why. He said he wanted to know what the customers understood that the company had been unable to explain to the investors. The other three investors all agreed.